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Responsive Design is a design philosophy where in the design of the system (the representation and the layout) responds/adapts depending upon the layout of the device. The primary reason to keep your design responsive is to increase the reach of your application to a larger user base using an array of devices.

Improving Usability and accessibility:

A responsive design improves the usability of the product. Few years back, before the advent of mobile Internet communication devices, Developers used to make their applications compatible with screens of various resolutions. This can also be called making the design responsive. In today's world, where more and more users are consuming information on your mobile devices, you need to handle the changing viewports and hardware.

Unlike popular belief, making design responsive does not necessarily mean fitting the entire application on the user's screen. It means:

intelligently pruning amount of information displayed and

making adjustments to the design to improve the users' experience while using the application.

For example, if you open a web application on desktop, you may consider going all guns blazing and displaying a lot of information in the available screen with each component occupying optimal space. But, when you switch to a mobile device, you should not try to squeeze all the information into the limited real estate on screen.

Instead you should choose to

drop out the less important chunks of information;

reduce the number of processor-heavy components (elements that need to be frequently updated/redrawn/re-calculated); and

reduce textual content to only highlight extremely important content

Like, a news app on desktop may show a snippet of the news article along with the headline and a thumbnail about the article. But, on mobile, it need only show the headline, timestamp and publisher, and so on.

Also, even though the mobile screens now-a-days sport desktop-like resolutions, you need to realize that the physical dimensions of these devices are still smaller. So, to make it easier for the user to consume the information, the developer should take steps like increasing the font-size, increasing the dimensions & placement of thumbnails, etc to make the information easily readable (accessible) even on a small screen.

Have a look at the examples listed on mediaqueri.es to get a better idea.

Good explanation. Let me just add that currently developers are using responsive web design to make the application look good enough across several form factors. I don't see many applications only fetching the data that is really displayed, i.e. data is still fetched, but not displayed to the user. –
jffJan 18 '14 at 11:48

A responsive design means a type of design where the characteristics of the website(such as width, alignment of data, etc) will get adjusted according to the width of the screen. This means that you are serving different webpages to users with a smartphone, a tablet or a laptop. This is a characteristic implemented on the code. This has got nothing to do with a specific design pattern.

Irrespective of how your website look, you can make a responsive design. This is rather a functional aspect than a design aspect, even though the functionality is achieved by the designer.

Responsive design is needed because of two reasons :

Usability : With the spike in the number of smartphone users, it gets more and more necessary for websites to provide content in such a way that it is easier for them to use.

The data-fullsrc is a custom HTML5 attribute used for any screen that is wider than 480 pixels

//This technique is fully supported in modern browsers, such as IE8+, Safari, Chrome and Opera, as well as mobile devices that use these same browsers (iPad, iPhone, etc.) //

the Viewport : [Testing media queries]

iPhone and iPod Touch is that Web designs automatically rescale to fit the tiny screen. Because this works only with Apple’s simulator, we can use an Apple-specific meta tag to fix the problem, placing it below the website’s section

This might be enough for the RWD. If we need full study, Flexible Grids and Flexible Images and Media will be added.

From a developer's perspective, a responsive site is slightly different than an adaptive site, which also changes its viewing experience based on viewport size. A responsive site / design flows and adapts it fluid grid based on the width of the viewport. An adaptive site / design, on the other hand, "snaps" to a predefined view to match its viewport. Just my 2 cents...

Express winter Pullover winter Boutique Boutique Sweater Responsive web design is the practice of building a website suitable to work on every device and every screen size, no matter how large or small, mobile or desktop. Responsive web design is focused around providing an intuitive and gratifying experience for everyone. Desktop computer and cell phone users alike all benefit from responsive websites.

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